System Performance Quotes

I think it killed the performance on a lot of the systems in the Labs for years because everyone had their own copy of it, but it wasn't being shared, and so they wasted huge amounts of memory back when memory was expensive.

To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consistent and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge.

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

China’s rulers … have come to see their purpose less as generating enormous change and more as maintaining the system and enhancing their performance.

DOS is ugly and interferes with users' experience.

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

I used to be interested in Windows NT, but the more I see it, the more it looks like traditional Windows with a stabler kernel. I don't find anything technically interesting there.

Putting Windows [3.11] on top of DOS is like putting whipped cream on a road apple [horse poop].

I think Leopard is a much better system [than Windows Vista] but OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary.

(Technology reliability) x (Human reliability) = (System reliability)

I think the most difficult thing had been scaling the infrastructure. Trying to support the response we had received from our users and the number of people that were interested in using the software.

It's important to be informed about issues like usability, reliability, security, privacy, and some of the inherent limitations of computers.

The number of queries in a large dataset is exponential, and it's growing exponentially. No matter how fast you make your system, you're never going to be able to get all that information.

And when the time comes to replace the O2 I have today, maybe my next machine will run Linux.

The idea of abstracting away the one thing that must be blindingly fast, the kernel, is inherently counter productive.

Management's job is to optimize the whole system.

Right now some people are just running around in circles and claiming that moving things to the kernel automatically makes it more stable. I'm telling you that the kernel is stable not because it's a kernel, but because I refuse to listen to arguments like this.

As educators and policy makers, it is important to demonstrate for parents the connection between high levels of student participation in assessment and system accountability - ensuring the success of every student.

I appreciate all the devices the Windows people are coming up with, but the operating system... I just want to smash it.

There are lots of Linux users who don't care how the kernel works, but only want to use it. That is a tribute to how good Linux is.

There is no finish line when it comes to system reliability and availability, and our efforts to improve performance never cease.

Unix has, I think for many years, had a reputation as being difficult to learn and incomplete. Difficult to learn means that the set of shared conventions, and things that are assumed about the way it works, and the basic mechanisms, are just different from what they are in other systems.

I believe that the monetary stability is an absolutely critical element in the satisfactory operation of a system.

Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.

The definition of an 'operating system' is bound to evolve with customer demands and technological possibilities.